Weight Loss: High Fructose Corn Syrup

The Devil's Candy

Food companies are adding an evil ingredient to their products that may turn your body into a fat-storing machine

During my first semester in graduate school, I took a course called food science, the study of ingredients in foods. It was 1980. "High-fructose corn syrup has recently been introduced into the food supply," my professor told us. "It's a very inexpensive sweetener and will likely replace sugar in most processed foods." I could tell she wasn't happy about that. She went on to explain that our understanding of how fructose works in the body was very limited, and we had no idea how it would affect the population.

Now we know.

High-fructose corn syrup is making America fat. How? By shutting off the switches that control appetite. It's more easily turned into fat than any other carbohydrate. And it's everywhere, from the obvious places like Coke and Mountain Dew to barbecue sauce and canned soup.

Consider this: In 1970, Americans ate about a half pound of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) per person per year. By 1997, we were consuming up to 62-1/2 pounds each, according to a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. That's 228 calories per person per day, and that figure is based on 6 -year-old numbers; consumption has almost certainly risen since then. And over the same time period, the obesity rate has more than doubled.

HFCS is different from other sugars and sweeteners, which can make you fat indirectly, over time. HFCS makes you fat by the straightest possible metabolic path. Let's look at where this stuff comes from, what it does to your body, and -- most important -- how to get as much of it as possible out of your diet.

Fructose Can Make You Fat

The problem with HFCS is the fructose -- a sugar that occurs naturally in fruit and honey--rather than the corn syrup. Corn syrup is primarily made up of a sugar called glucose, which can be burned up as a source of immediate energy, stored in your liver and muscles for use later, or, as a last resort, turned into fat. But corn syrup isn't as sweet as other sugars, which is why the food-processing industry fell head over heels in love with high-fructose corn syrup, a cheap and doubly sweet chemical derivative.

But what's good for Coca-Cola's profit margins isn't that great for your health. That's because your body doesn't necessarily use fructose as an immediate source of energy. "Fructose is more readily metabolized into fat," says Peter Havel, Ph.D., a nutrition researcher at the University of California at Davis. Havel is among a growing number of scientists who suspect that there's a connection between fructose and America's skyrocketing rates of obesity and diabetes.

We should mention that we aren't saying the small amounts of fructose you get through fruit or honey will make you fat. Fruit is packed with vitamins, minerals, and fiber, all of which are components of a healthy diet.

HFCS, though, delivers -- mostly through soft drinks -- amounts of fructose that are unprecedented in human history. "Soda consumption has doubled, from 25 to 50 gallons per person [per year] from 1975 to 2000," says Greg Critser, a journalist and author of Fat Land, which fingers fructose as one of the major culprits in the obesity epidemic.

Critser says that HFCS is about 20 percent cheaper than cane sugar. Both contain a combination of fructose and glucose, but the low cost of HFCS has made it easier for manufacturers to supersize their portions. "The serving size of sodas has almost doubled, from about 10 ounces to about 18 ounces" because of HFCS, Critser says.

None of which would be a huge problem if we simply ate less of everything else to compensate for the fact that we're consuming more fructose. But we don't; average Americans now eat about 200 more calories per day than we did in the '70s.